


crepusculascens

by satellites (brella)



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Canon Expansion, F/M, Injury Recovery, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The time Irina changes her mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	crepusculascens

**Author's Note:**

> I heard that Macey might or might not have a thing for one half of a ship tending to the other injured half and figured I'd exploit this. WE TRADED. Thank god I finished this, because now I can read the one she wrote for me without a guilty conscience.

“You should go,” Irina murmurs, her voice hoarse, wiping sloppily at her running nose with one hand. Unexpectedly, Fortunato finds that he has never been less welcoming to any words than he is to those.

Hesitation is difficult to articulate in English. He had been taught, as a child, that if disagreeing with someone became unavoidable, it required tact and clear reasoning, and neither of those is something he can confidently grasp when he cannot use the tongue he knows. But then, Irina has never had any trouble with making him forget how to speak.

“I…” He shakes his head. “I am not sure that is a good idea.”

That, at least, is accurate – though the darkness of the night and his coat on her shoulders are masking them, he had caught sight of the gashes torn across her moonlit skin, the blood tracing crooked spiderwebs onto her cheeks, which look more ashen now than they had when he had found her (shaking, delirious, frightened, splattered in blood that he was sure was only partially her own, and he had known that the Irina who had fallen into his arms was no longer the Irina with whom he had grown into a young man).

He has been forcing back frowns of silent pain for the past hour, every time his eyes have strayed against his will to her lacerated arms and her wild eyes, which seem so much more bottomless now. She tightens her bloodied grip on his coat and clenches her jaw, puffing out an exhale through her nose.

“And why is that?” she demands. “There will be consequences if they realize you are gone, Fortunato; you must go back.”

Fortunato shakes his head, and the act of small defiance feels strange to him, as though he is on the brink of initiating a riot. (And he has had enough of riots, enough of streets on fire and broken glass and shallow mass graves and unanswered prayers.)

“Your injuries require immediate attention,” he tells her matter-of-factly, but when he tries to speak again, his vocabulary stutters. “It… it looks very bad, sister. I—I cannot leave you—”

Irina scoffs, the sound hitting her teeth hard.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “I am not one of your wounded cats, Fortunato; there is no time for tending to me. Every second that I spend sniveling over a few little scrapes like some pathetic child is another second they have to _plan_ , and their plans are to kill us all; do you understand? You speak of things you do not comprehend, th-things I hope you will never have to.” Her eyes screw shut and she whispers, almost to herself, “I am not a _baby_. I can handle a few _bruises_.”

“They are not bruises,” Fortunato says quietly, though her monologue had chilled him.

Irina curls in on herself, looking away from him. “I am _fine_ , Fortunato—”

“Please,” he implores her, and when she finally glances back to him with unguarded surprise loosening her waifish features, she is met with great solemnity. Fortunato’s eyes wander to his hands in his lap, and he tampers down an instinctive shiver when the wind prickles against the trees and strokes goosebumps up his spine (and he tells himself that yes, it is only the wind). “I-I must help you. It is – obrigação. You are not well.” He considers approaching her with a tactic more conducive to the way she processes things. “You will be of no use to the mission if your injuries overwhelm you, yes?”

Irina scowls indignantly at him like an incredibly displeased child, which loses much of its potency due to her wan complexion and erratic shivers from the increasing cold. Fortunato stares patiently back at her. The last spitting vestiges of the fire fill her deep and glistening cuts with dissonant gold. Smoke rises in the crisp air.

“Please,” Fortunato repeats before looking at his hands. “I… I worry.”

“You are always worrying,” Irina grumbles immediately, as though she had given his uncharacteristically raw words no thought at all. Her face contorts with resolve and she flattens her palms in the dirt, pushing herself shakily to her feet.

Fortunato surrenders to his impulse and looks away. Her legs are torn and pale and her knees are wobbling, and he can see dried blood around her navel through the rip in her shirt.

“I m-must…” she whispers, and Fortunato surges up to catch her before even she seems aware she is falling again. She is far too light in his arms, he thinks as he holds her, and may the Lord forgive him for the heat and blossoms over his skin and through his lungs when her body sags against his. Her hair smells of gunpowder, woodsmoke. He yearns for the days when it had carried only the scent of the sandy afternoon sun and the date palms Father Abraham would bring to their tents.

“It is all right,” he murmurs to her, though he doesn’t know what possesses him to. “I am with you now, sister. Sleep.”

Her blood stains his clothes in peculiar shapes as he carries her, treading slowly and training his eyes on the ground below instead of the slope of her pallid neck in the nighttime, to a cave he had passed on his way to find her. He had not been sure of why he had run into the forest to begin with, but now he is tempted never to leave. They will grow free and wild and there will be no deity before whom to kneel except for her, the sun outlining her silhouette in holy light and color.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Irina wakes slowly to the sound of a language she does not understand.

Her eyes roll frantically behind her sunlight-stained eyelids, but she cannot draw up the strength to open them. Earth and cloth presses into her elbows and her neck and there is comfortable tightness all up and down her arms and legs, all across her torso. Every breath scrapes her throat raw. She lies still, attempting to assess her whereabouts.

A deep voice is murmuring a prayer in a language she half-understands, like a river flowing, eternally turning over the stones within it. “ _Mas proponho firmemente, com o auxílio de vossa divina graça, e pela_ —”

The name rises in her chest before she can consider speaking. “For…tun…”

Fingers immediately graze the back of her hand and then sharply withdraw, as though thinking the better of what they had done on instinct.

“Yes, sister,” the same voice greets her, so much more ungainly now, though whether it is from emotion or mere inexperience she cannot be sure. “I am here. I am here.”

“What have you done?” she croaks, barely audible. “What have you…”

At last, she manages to pry her sticky eyelids apart, closing her dry lips and wheezing out the tiniest of gasps. Her vision clouds with indistinguishable daylight, with a dim shadow framed by protruding ears. She coughs, and it seems to tear through her whole body, but the pain is duller now than it had been in the cold and crooked woods.

Everything slips into gradual focus after a moment. While she waits for it to do so, she remembers her dream – she had brought back a fox for supper and her mother’s smile had reached her eyepatch and shifted her gossamer scars and in the firelight, the words “Well done” had seemed an exaltation, and the meat had tasted like butter in her hungry mouth.

Fortunato’s face is the first thing she sees. His eyes are swollen from lack of sleep, and there are dark circles hung over the skin beneath them, and his eyelashes are thicker and longer than she remembers, almost. He is backed by the mossy stone walls of a cave. The ground beneath her is damp and smells like rain.

She pushes herself up on her elbows with an annoyed groan at the effort it takes and feebly swats away Fortunato’s concerned hand when it strays toward her arm. She blinks down at herself, frowning dubiously. Her skin is clean and wrapped in fresh white bandages, and she is wearing an Academy uniform t-shirt three sizes too large for her and a pair of loose blue shorts. Her feet are bare.

She curls her toes. They pop and crack gratefully.

“What is this?” she asks in a hesitant hush. When Fortunato does not promptly answer, her eyes dart to him and he fidgets. His tie is, for the first time she has ever seen it so, slightly askew.

“I could not obtain any spare clothes for… for females without drawing the – attention of the staff,” he explains, the words thick with hurry and therefore with his accent. “So those are… those clothes you are wearing, they are Guillaume’s.”

“You put me in them?” she asks, and Fortunato immediately slouches from clear mortification.

“I repented,” he whispers, and that is enough of an answer for her. She looks to the bandages now, to how efficiently they have encased her arms and legs; she lifts up the hem of the shirt despite Fortunato’s scandalized noise to find the gauze there, too.

“You did all of this?” she mumbles.

“I…” Fortunato seems on the brink of uttering words the air itself would not be ready to hear or hold, but he closes them up in a mason jar before they can escape him. Irina is accustomed to this theft of sentiment now. “Yes. It is not very much, but it is… it is the best I could do. Here – I have brought you food. Soup, and those strange biscuits that Ian likes.”

“He let you take them?” Irina asks in astonishment over the rumble in her stomach.

Fortunato grimaces. “I repented.”

Irina stills. Twice today Fortunato has sinned for her sake. Her fingernails dig into the dirt beneath her and she blows her bangs out of her face, and only then does she notice that her hair is not hanging gnarled at either side of her as it had been the night before. She reaches up automatically and her fingers prod into a thick braid.

“This was you also?” she demands, pointing.

Fortunato’s back is to her as he hunches over the cardboard box he had apparently brought with him, and he does not seem to hear her, or at the very least elects to ignore her. She has to bite her tongue at how his broad shoulders are more visible than they should be through the thin white fabric of the Academy dress shirt, of how careful his fingers are.

He turns back around on his knees and shuffles closer to her, his soft brown eyes ducked. In one hand is a can of soup, and in the other is a sleeve of what she has come to recognize (from years in Ian’s vicinity) as Tim-Tams.

“That is hardly an appropriate diet for recovery,” she starts to tease him, but the strength suddenly seems to stoop out of her arms and she reclines clumsily, her back loosening gratefully with the motion.

Fortunato hushes her gently, and she feels a palm on her forehead, barely there, as though it is frightened that she will sear it. "Sleep."

Irina is not sure what the second word means. Judging by the whisper of panic that she hears just before she drifts away again, Fortunato had not meant to use it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She wakes from the nightmares not wailing but in tears, curling in on herself and shaking on the ground, trying to crawl to a dark corner to contort her body into a hundred positions of self-protection. Fortunato’s arms are always stiff with uncertainty when he halts her by holding her, when he smooths her hair with one palpitating hand and sings hymns to her. One night, tired of the swollenness of the empty space between them, she grips his shirt and tugs herself closer and buries her face in his chest, and that is when Fortunato seems to forget his chastity and his composure and clutches her to him, vows to her that as long as she is not afraid then he is not, either.

“Fortunato, you do not understand,” she whimpers, and she forces her eyes to stay open because when she closes them, she only sees the Headmaster, only hears the sounds of her own firing rifle and her own violent screams, only smells the fragrant flowers of the nighttime, the peculiar morning glories that open under the moon and only blossom in darkness. “Y-You must be afraid. We must all be frightened, now; we must all use this fright and blot it from the world with our bare hands. I only… this is not a game, not anymore. No. No, I only… I want to go home; I only want us all to be safe now, together. I want this to be _over_.” She grits her teeth. “That is why I must end it. I am the only one who wishes it to end.”

“I will end it with you,” Fortunato promises in his clumsy accent, his fingers gripping her shoulders. “Please, sister, be calm. I am here.”

A voice in Irina’s head begs of him: _Always be here. Do not ever leave me, do not ever let the winter catch me, and if you must, keep me warm in it_. _I will kindle you fires and kiss the ice from your skin; I will paint our table with the blood of that which I hunt and I will carve us a bed from cedar and all of our siblings will dance for the spring; no more deserts, no more hallways, only grass_.

Instead, she lets him run his fingers over her wounds with chaste care; she lets him kiss her forehead in blessing and she pretends she does not notice the flush in his cheeks when he finishes. He is not always there in that cave with her – he has classes, he has curfews. But when he is, Irina forgets the mingling stench of flowers and blood; Irina forgets the glass burrowing itself in her spine as that monster threw her from the window. Irina forgets how easily her body can bend and break, just as she had for many years before sprinting into that greenhouse, for her body seems at times to be made of marble when the pads of Fortunato’s digits skirt across her elbow when he thinks she is asleep. Her body seems to be infinite and whole, even if it is only the hairs on her head that he will ever touch.

They walk out of the cave together and she grips the cold metal of her rifle in her hands, and it is then that she knows that she must change now. _Love is of no use in a place like this_.

Fortunato looks behind him when he parts from her to walk back to the school. She meets his eye, and nods, and slings the gun over her shoulder, and she is a fool to run so loudly through the trees instead of prowling, but there is something in the twitch of his eyebrows, something in the way his shoulders slacken at the sight of her, that spurs her so fiercely that she feels compelled to break from light and air, so that she might never take either of them from him again.

She keeps his coat folded up under a pad of protective leaves in that cave. Sometimes, in those woods, it is all that she has, but it is always enough.

That sort of thing has always frightened them both equally. Perhaps, Irina thinks idly to herself, they are both learning, now, to be afraid. 


End file.
